If I Had A Flower
by Destiny919
Summary: Lydia the butterfly, he thinks that so often. Fluttering and beautiful and always, always just out of reach. Butterflies fly away if you approach them too fast. Written for Stydia Week 2014.


"_If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk through my garden forever."_

_- _Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Stiles thinks flowers grow beneath Lydia's feet wherever she steps, and he waters them as he trails behind, making sure they are never too long without sunlight. A garden follows in her wake, just like he does, and she is a bright butterfly that makes her own nectar.

His hands tremble when he waters the flowers, tremble whenever he gets too close to the butterfly.

Well, they used to tremble. They trembled before Lydia ever touched him, before she'd ever really looked him in the eyes and saw something that made her heart quicken and breath catch and cheeks heat. Now she's looked, and she often touches him like he's all that anchors her to the world - he knows that she is what anchors him, and so his hands no longer tremble. Anchors are still and sure and heavy - but Stiles keeps his touch light, as a butterfly's wings.

Lydia the butterfly, he thinks that so often. Fluttering and beautiful and always, always just out of reach. Butterflies fly away if you approach them too fast.

In one of his earliest memories, one with his mother - it's those that stand out the most, the ones that he'll never get any more of - in that memory, precious for its finite nature, he is out in the garden with her. She used to keep a garden, small but meticulously cared-for. It went to waste and ruin when she was confined to her bed and then the hospital's bed and then the earth's bed, to decay instead of grow like what she'd used to cultivate. Butterflies used to love his mother's garden, and he always tried to catch them in his pudgy child's hands. It never worked.

But his mother gave him some advice. Sit still - or as Stiles was ever capable of being, even then - and wait for the butterfly to come to him, when it felt safe, when it was ready.

And after many days of painstaking waiting, using more patience than he'd ever exerted - yet, he'd need much more later - the butterfly came. It alighted upon his knee, and flapped its glass-and-cellophane wings. The antennae twitched. The fuzzy scratchy little legs tickled Stiles' small knee cap. He stayed perfectly still. And the butterfly lingered.

But the sky had grown gray and swirling, and a distant growl of thunder echoed on the horizon, and his mother told him, sadly, that it was time to go inside because the rain would start soon.

The butterfly flew away right then, anyway.

Despite that, he knew deep in his bones that it would come back to him. Somehow.

It was only one year later that his mother died, and another year after that he started third grade, together with his best friend Scott, and fell in love with Lydia Martin.

The butterfly, which his mother had identified as a Queen, was black and deep orange with white spots. On that first day of school, Lydia Martin is wearing a black blouse with white spots, and her hair is orange. No, not orange. Not red either. It's - ?

_Strawberry blonde_, he hears her telling a mousy-haired girl on the playground who'd expressed jealousy. And rightly so. Lydia's hair is beautiful. Lydia is beautiful. More than the butterfly. And more fascinating. Stiles committed her terminology to memory - he had an impressive memory when he chose to exercise it, his parents said so, had been told so by teachers who also mentioned things called _Ritalin _and _Adderall _in soft voices. He was using it now. He'd always remember - Lydia Martin's hair is actually strawberry blonde. But it still looks like the butterfly's fragile flutterings to him.

They talk to each other during that year, because it's third grade and they're nine and everybody is still friends with everybody. They're involved in the same games of tag on the playground. Stiles is in love, he swears it to Scott after school at his friend's house, where Melissa (she told him ages ago that Mrs. Mccall isn't necessary) serves them peanut butter crackers and milk as a snack.

Love is gross, Scott says, spraying cracker crumbs out of his full mouth. Besides, it's for grownups. They don't mind that gross stuff. But his eyes flick to his mother, standing alone at the counter. His dad left three years ago. Scott doesn't talk about it, doesn't bring up his father at all. Stiles knows far better than to do so himself. Just like Scott doesn't bring up Claudia Stilinski, who didn't leave, is just _gone_.

Stiles shakes his head adamantly. Lydia isn't gross, she isn't gross at all, she is neat and dainty and would never spit crumbs at me like _you_ do.

(Little does he know that, just a scant eight years later, she'll be spewing chocolate chip cookie at him because he made her laugh so hard about a stupid werewolf pun, because if they can make such simple moronic jokes about their horror movie lives, then maybe it'll become like "Scary Movie" instead of "The Blair Witch Project" when everyone thought it was real, because it _is_ real, _it is it is it is_, it is so real - but at least she has this, she has laughing with Stiles about a dumb dog pun while he's got that warm look in his eyes - .)

Years pass, and peanut butter crackers and milk turn into pizza rolls and Dr. Pepper, turn into actual pizza, and Chinese take-out, and Red Bull, consumed absently while trying to figure out how they are going to survive _this_ time.

And Lydia, they're not talking about her and whether being in love with her is gross. No, instead she's there _with _them, in the flesh, picking over bits of information about _Bhūta_, her hand brushing Stiles' as they both reach for the bowl of pretzels. And even though their knees are already touching, even though they touch each other so often nowadays, it still sets off tingles. And he swears, he _swears_ she gets them too. A light flush appears on her cheeks and her eyes spark just a little, and he sees the corner of Scott's mouth twitch up, because of course he can hear an escalation of someone's heartbeat.

Or two someones, because his isn't too normal right now either. All it takes is a brush of the hand, even when they're already -. He. Is. Such. A. _Goner. _

But he's known that since third grade. He's known that since he saw her, the butterfly come back to him.

So it had seemed at the time, anyway. For the next seven-odd years, she'd been the butterfly, yes, but she'd been winging through the air far, far above his head, too high for it to even be worth making a few desperate grabs and jumps for.

Not that he didn't try. Oh god, did he try.

But then Scott changed, literally, and everything changed. He, Stiles, changed. _Lydia _changed, through circumstances that he would give almost anything to spare her from, even if it would mean she wasn't sitting here next to him, knees touching, hands brushing in the pretzel bowl.

It had happened, despite a few desperate attempts to stop it - _Lydia! Run!_ shouting with all the breath in his body, which was none because he was also running faster than he ever had in his life - and she had been used and tortured and almost driven insane by Peter Hale, been dragged into everything, given rare powers of her own that they barely understood. He hated that she had gone through that, but if she wasn't here now, in the pack, Stiles had no idea how they could have survived. They probably couldn't have. And, despite the guilt he feels over her becoming part of this, over all of it, actually, right down to asking Scott to find a dead body with him and him getting bitten - he can't think about that. Despite that, anyway, he's been so overjoyed to finally know her, truly, and for her to know him. It often seems as if she knows him better than anyone, in some ways even better than Scott.

The butterfly is fluttering within arm's reach. Lydia is touching him and smiling at him and even kissed him, once, a brush of wings against his cheek. It's so close to him now. But he remembers what his mother told him, and waits for the butterfly to finally flutter over and land on him by itself. It'll happen someday, he just has to be patient. She's worth it.


End file.
